


Mr Strange's regrets upon leaving Cambridge

by Ilthit



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke, Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Auction, Fae & Fairies, JSAMN Society of Magicians, M/M, Masturbation, Pre-Canon, Regency, Smut, Superpower Sex, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 15:02:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4629714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilthit/pseuds/Ilthit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alessandro Simonelli was fastidious, studious, and often right, which was another of his faults as an academic. That the pleasant and popular Jonathan Strange would make friends with such a man left many under the impression that their relationship was unsavoury, which to an outside observer it certainly might have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr Strange's regrets upon leaving Cambridge

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the JSAMN Society of Magicians auction exchange and for somethin-strange@tumblr, but also because I couldn't resist the opportunity. It isn't the pairing asked for! I may have to write another. Oh, the BOTHER. Another bit of filth featuring Jonathan Strange. How will I bear it.

Henry Woodhope was the truest of friends and a fine fellow, as Mr Strange would tell anyone who inquired his opinion on his boyhood friend. Henry was, however, somewhat stately in his relative poverty, a dignity that was almost like a religion itself. It came on late in life, but it came on nonetheless, built upon a character already prone to seriousness.

Many men who take to the profession of a clergyman do so out of necessity or lack of other occupation and assume the cloak of respectability as if it was the latest trend in coats. Henry might have been a very different fellow had he gone to sea, but the determination to serve God had taken hold early and was, in any case, most likely the better choice. However, it meant that Jonathan Strange had lost something in Henry: a friend one could confide to. He might have told the boy Henry any thing and had it accepted as uncomplicated fact, or led him to all kinds of trouble, sure to be forgiven and forgotten as soon as the apples had been eaten. The man Henry, by contrast, was rather prone to moralizing.

"Well, Jonathan, of course any friend of yours is a friend of mine," said Henry over the stilton they were sharing at a large and noisy coaching-inn somewhere between Ashfair and Cambridge. It was the kind of affable and obvious lie that peppered much of Henry's conversation (honesty is a feature not of words but of character; no doubt Henry believed it when he said it). "But I must confess I do not understand your friendship with this Mr Simonelli. I have only met him once. Perhaps he improves upon closer acquaintance."

"I'm afraid not," said Strange. "When you met him, he had just received top marks and a special commendation for his essay on Horace, and was in a particularly polite and affable mood."

"Good God," said Henry. Strange laughed.

Strange had never intended to remain long at Cambridge, and indeed his indifferent scholarship was on its last legs. He had thought college life highly preferable to the dour halls of his unloving father, and even to the clammy weather of his cousins' Scotland. The season only lasted so long in Bath, and without a friend to travel with, Europe quickly grew stale. At Cambridge, he had his comfortable quarters, a cadre of friends, and only the occasional letter from his father to remind him he was a wastrel, a spendthrift and a waste of space. A young man could hardly be better set up. The difference between Bath and university, however, was that at university one had to contend with the same set of faces from one day to the next. Rivalries sprung up based either on something as petty as a new translation of Plato, or as weighty as the matter of a few borrowed bottles of wine. Learning accumulated in the hallowed halls, but so did stupidity, greed, jealousy, drunkenness, and sheer bull-headed viciousness. Strange had been ready to leave for well over a year, held back by the disenchantment he felt for any other available position or occupation, against which the few remaining pleasures of Cambridge became magnified. Strange's arrangement with Alessandro Simonelli was one such pleasure.

Dark-haired and pale, with fine, Roman features, Simonelli's looks were universally admired, though his personality, which was proud, reclusive and quarrelsome, was not. It was not, furthermore, always thought a good thing to be handsome, or to attract without effort or any other personal advantage the notice of beautiful and wealthy ladies. The less savoury element of Simonelli and Strange's peers had long since decided that Mr Simonelli would not know what to do with any of his feminine admirers. He certainly never proved them otherwise.

He was fastidious, studious, and often right, which was another of his faults as an academic. Few attempted conversation with him twice. That the pleasant and popular Jonathan Strange would make friends with such a man left many under the impression that their relationship was unsavoury, which to an outside observer it certainly might have been. Such a judgment depends upon one's opinion on buggery.

Seducing Simonelli had been surprisingly straight-forward. Certainly he had kept up a monologue of mild reprove throughout, but upon discovering that this did not discourage Strange from kissing his neck, he had soon began to advice him on how to do it better. That afternoon, they had had a pleasurable, if somewhat awkward and ink-stained, encounter on the floor of Simonelli's study, and more had followed. Gossip did its rounds. Strange did not particularly mind it, and Simonelli did not even notice it.

Strange could not mention any of this to Henry, whose opinions on buggery were well known to him, as were his opinions on early milk, Whiggery, and gentlemen marrying before the age of thirty. As mad as the thought was, telling Henry's sister seemed less likely to land him in trouble. The thought of Arabella Woodhope made his stomach knot in a way that was becoming familiar, though he did not yet know what name to put to the feeling, and so he put her out of his mind.

The late summer had been cool and rainy. The inn smelled of rain-soaked serge and sweat. Strange paid for a cheap, single room for the night for both of them, as was his habit when travelling with Henry, who would insist on paying his half. The inn was old, its wooden floors worn down and polished by a hundred years of visitors' feet. The walls of their room groaned under the weight of the roof. Rain continued to patter on the window, and below and around came the sounds of a house full of people.

The sun was still setting as Strange and Henry undressed. It was an odd hour to be going to bed, but the journey had been long and exhausting, with another leg ahead of them early on the morrow, and the wine at their very early supper had been full and strong, if somewhat bitter. Henry, who had been up since morning prayers, was asleep within moments of his head hitting the pillow.

Strange, who was used to being closer to sunrise than sunset when going to bed, stayed awake to watch the long shadows move and darken, and the square of light cast by the window upon the floor grow dim and disappear. Tomorrow evening he would be back at Ashfair. He would greet Cantanker and Augustus again, and could see for himself the cut Augustus had received that had so worried Harold, the coachmaster. His father would not have bothered to summon a horse-doctor, even had the wound become infected.

And then? He did not know. He supposed he must think of something to do with himself until the beginning of the next season. He might invite Simonelli to stay, and have the man do unspeakable things to him in his own bed, within the walls of his bastard father's house. Let the servants know the young master was entertaining a foreign beauty between his legs every night while his father sat up with his tally-books and stale malice.

A foot away (the room must usually have slept three-a-bed), Henry was tucked into himself, facing the window, his breathing slow and steady. In another two or so hours, he would turn and begin to snore. Strange lay on his back and yawned. His knee, the one closest to Henry, rose up, and his hand found its way down to the front of his small-clothes. He closed his eyes and thought about Alessandro.

He remembered the sensation of Alessandro's cock tickling the back of his throat, hot and bitter, and opened his mouth in the darkness as if to take it again. Alessandro would first be telling him to exercise care and decorum, to mind his teeth and not get carried away, and then, after a while, to put his back to it. Had Strange learned nothing? Alessandro would have to show him again. There – he must angle his head back and let the organ move freely inside his mouth, breathe around it – something Strange would find hard to do when, a moment later, Alessandro would growl, grab a handful of his hair, and ram his cock down Strange's throat. Strange would take hold of his hips (they would be bare to the thighs only, with Alessandro's breeches and smallclothes bundled at his knees) and endure until his head felt light and he was obliged to signal to Alessandro to belay.

If Alessandro were here now, he would straddle Strange's chest and grab the bare, sturdy headboard of the bed, as no doubt many men had before him. His member would stick out, pink and tapered and perfect, from underneath the fall of his shirt. Strange would take it in his hand and encourage it with thumb and palm, his other hand reaching around Alessandro to rub the stretch of skin behind his balls until Alessandro deigned to place himself on Strange's tongue and fuck his head into the pillow.

Strange unlaced his drawers enough to reach a hand inside and took his own pleasantly engorged member in hand. Alessandro could give as good as he got, and more so – at times Strange was sure he must have mastered the trick of breathing with a full throat, though it was a skill he never managed to teach Strange, and indeed maintained he had simply held his breath. For minutes! Strange had thought himself hot-blooded once, but he had nothing on Alessandro's nearly supernatural fortitude. Within moments of spilling salty warm spunk down Strange's throat, he could flip him over and give him the kind of fucking his body would remember for days. Indeed, it still remembered their most recent good-byes now.

Strange sighed and rolled over on his belly, taking care not to pull at Henry's blankets. His bed-fellow made no sound; his chest continued to rise and fall to the shallow, slow rhythm of sleep. Strange lifted his hips as if to give Alessandro access. He imagined his lover's slim, strong body looming over him, Alessandro's long fingers digging into the flesh of his buttocks, his trimmed nails curiously sharp, like claws resting on his skin, pregnant with the promise of breaking it.

"Sometimes I believe you could be clever, Jonathan, if you applied yourself," Alessandro had said the last time they saw each other. "There is nothing in the world to stop you becoming a Fellow if you desire."

"I should like to see _you_ apply yourself, sir," Strange had replied. "I have a long coach ride ahead of me and I mean for it to be uncomfortable." At which point Alessandro had smiled his rare, mocking smile, lifted Strange's legs higher under his arms, and driven his cock deep inside him, hard enough to make Strange cry out and scramble for a handhold on the sopha's arm. He bit his lip now, tugged down his own underclothes, quickly sucked his index finger, and reached behind himself to finger his own arse.

He mouthed the pillow as he sunk his finger in almost up to the knuckle. There was still a slight sting of abrasion from Alessandro fucking him open, and from the roads bumping him on his backside for the better part of the preceding day, but having the inside of his arse massaged never failed to make Strange rut like a dog in heat. His prick thrust into his other hand, and he could only wish he had a third one to attend to his balls, as well.

Strange was three and twenty years old, his scrawny, long limbs still on their way to the fullness of well-fed manhood, and he scrunched them up now to frick himself twice over. If only he had an obsidian phallos such as they said McCullough _minor_ kept on his mantelpiece. He could sit up and impale himself upon it. Would Henry wake if he rocked the bed? He was rocking it now, he realized. It was too late to do anything about it. With pleasant images of himself bouncing on McCullough's bawdy _objet de décor_ and of Alessandro's critical eye upon his efforts, perhaps with one hand casually petting Strange's hair, Strange spent with a muffled groan onto the often-stained rough cotton sheets, and collapsed.

The wine, Strange mused, certainly had been strong. He felt very much inclined to follow the downwards spiral of pleasure into sleep, but collected himself enough to draw up and retie his small-clothes. Henry was very still. Too still – had he woken up? Was he stiff with shock? Nevermind – Henry was a gentleman, and would never mention what he'd witnessed. His clothes arranged, Strange allowed himself to curl up, and sleep claimed him for the next few hours.

That night at the coaching inn, Jonathan Strange dreamed that he was walking with Alessandro Simonelli in an untamed grove of trees, picking their way through branches that stuck out like bones from the soft, mossy ground, the sun above them a sickly white. A pair of butterflies flittering about them turned out, on closer examination, to be fine ladies with wings like dragonflies, dressed in gowns of tiny bones. "Go home, English magician," said one of them. "Go back to your darkness," said the other. "Can you not see the King no longer wants you here? You are far too dull and stupid." Hurt, Strange looked at Alessandro, but the man simply turned away.

The morning found him sullen, a mood that failed to dissipate even after breakfast. Henry was forced to amuse himself with a book of ecclesiastical poetry for the final leg of their journey home.


End file.
